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Meta agreed to pay around $17 billion to a collection of 47 states and some U.S. territories this week as penance for what the attorneys-general of said states and territories claimed was its decision to allow minors to use its social media platforms despite purposely designing them in a way that made them addictive and thus harmful to said youth.
The settlement further requires Meta to put into place a system that would restrict usage and late-night notifications for those under 18.
It would further require them to implement an oversight infrastructure wherein a series of auditors would monitor Meta to ensure compliance.
But Alan, you may be wondering, how exactly will Meta know if someone is under 18?
Will they just ask? Use one of those European “guess my age” apps? Will they require them to upload birth certificates and parental approval slips? Something else?
And the answer is that it’s still unclear but will inevitably involve something that your average teen can easily get around, and thus the whole project will be rendered useless.
Why It Matters
How many of you went to a bar using a fake ID long before you were legal?
I thought so.
And that involves obtaining a physical document and venturing out of your house and showing that fake document to an actual human.
Sneaking onto social media is going to be so, so much easier.
Don’t believe me?
Ask the Australian e-Safety Commission which found that three months after the total ban on social media for those under 16 went into effect, reported use of social media in that cohort only declined from 85.9% to 81.5%.
And that’s a total ban.
The other factor that prevents this settlement from being anything more than feel-good theater is that it only impacts Meta.
Meaning that in reality it only impacts Instagram, the number of Gen Alphas with any desire to use Facebook being on par with the number interested in joining Civil War re-enactment societies.
Meaning that if by some odd chance Meta does manage to make it difficult for teens to use Meta with the digital equivalent of a fake ID, all that will happen is they’ll spend even more time on TikTok and YouTube.
Now what is interesting here is that some language buried deep inside the agreement that says that payment of $5.3 billion of the $17 billion, or around one-third of the total amount, is, in fact, contingent on TikTok and YouTube having to adopt similar measures around age restrictions, time-on-platform restrictions and the like, while also paying similarly large amount of cash money to the states. (Here’s Meta’s take on it.)
And in the immortal words of Cher Horowitz, as if!
As if TikTok or Alphabet would ever agree to something like that. As if whatever legal machinations exist that could force them to accept some sort of ban would be able to make it happen anytime in the next ten years. As if both platforms will not try and claim they are nothing like Meta and thus not responsible for the problems of social media-addicted youth.
On that last one, they actually have a point.
As you will soon read in my upcoming book, The Collapse of the Monoculture and the Rise of Feudal Media, TikTok is indeed different than other social media platforms in that it never started out with the users own social graph—it was always algorithmic and based on what your perceived interests were.
Which doesn’t mean there’s not another argument there—TikTok’s algorithm is notorious for sending users down rabbit holes of fake news while narrowing the boundaries of each Feudal Media bubble, pushing them towards groupthink.
But proving that this has been responsible for billions of dollars worth of harm to America’s teens is a very different challenge.
So those are the practical/legal reasons this looks more like window dressing than an actual solution.
But there are also greater societal reasons.
While there are no doubt some kids whose use of social media became toxic and harmful, we now have an entire cohort of adults in their 20s and early 30s who came of age using social media and are none the worse for it.
Yes, there is the “Gen Z Stare” and countless tales of their lack of enthusiasm for hard work, but well, anyone remember “slackers?” Millennials and their helicopter parents showing up at the office to talk to their boss?
The kids will be just fine.
Meaning the deal seems ripe for backlash, for people asking why it is Meta’s responsibility to police the use of its platform and not the parents?
Because someone needed to actually go out and buy that smartphone and give it to their kid, and if the parent can’t figure out how to monitor what their 14 year-old is up to, then maybe that shouldn’t be Mark Zuckerberg’s responsibility either.
And then there is Wall Street. Which still does not understand modern media, but tends to err on the side of panic nonetheless.
So the fact that Meta’s stock prices rose after the settlement was announced is a good sign that Wall Street is not panicking, that they too believe the fact that Meta was able to get the AG’s to an agreement is not the massive blow certain anti-social media types are claiming, given that it finally gets Meta out of legal limbo.
At least for now—there’s another school of thought that says this opens the floodgate for new and often specious lawsuits, but that’s a maybe not a definite, so not something to worry about today.
Finally, there is the U.S. government. Which many people feel should be the ones implementing any restrictions and doing so across all social media while setting standards for age verification procedures, ensuring they are both uniform and privacy compliant.
But here again, I fall back on the Horowitzian “As if” because the odds of our current government reaching consensus on something like youth access to social media—let alone how to regulate it—is at about nil.
So there’s that too.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are Meta you can breathe a sigh of relief. The Big Lawsuit has been settled and the sky did not fall, your stock prices held.
You may be hassled still by prosecutors and politicians who see messing with Meta as a good way to get press and get votes. That, or they’ll start hassling you about enforcement, about how all the middle school kids are still on Instagram 24/7 and why can’t you do anything about it?
Which is a potential problem you should not ignore, but it’s not a major one. I mean if nothing else, those middle school kids are far more likely to be on TikTok.
If you are Meta’s PR and legal teams, I’d double down on that TikTok/YouTube clause. For PR purposes it is a very strong argument: shut the kids down on Instagram and they’re only going to go to TikTok. Which half the country probably thinks is still owned by the Chinese.
There’s also an inherent unfairness to singling out Meta while giving YouTube and TIkTok a free pass and in the court of public opinion, that is going to be your best friend.
If you are YouTube and TikTok, drag your feet.
You don’t need to get into any sorts of settlements and the longer you delay the process the more likely it is to be forgotten. That and social media 2031 is going to look a lot different than social media 2026. Which may indeed help with your argument that you are not one of those evil addictive social media networks like Meta.
Or not, but you’ve got at least five years to worry about coming up with a coherent argument.
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